Gary Carter dead much too young as NY Mets family mourns the loss of this Amazin’ Kid

Gary Carter (r.) and Keith Hernandez celebrate after clinching NL East title in 1988. (Peter Morgan/AP)

In a sad and memorable and dramatic and self-destructive way, all those ways, the old Mets — the Mets out of October of 1986 — were our Boys of Summer. You think about it more now because Gary Carter dies much too young.

Gary Carter's Mets did not have Jack Roosevelt Robinson making the history he did, dying young the way he did, or Roy Campanella having that terrible car accident. The heartbreaks the old Mets visited on their fans after '86, the ones they brought upon themselves much later, weren't the same as Brooklyn's heartbreaks. And the Mets never left town the way the Dodgers did.

Darling said, “Keith Hernandez taught us how to win, without a doubt. But we needed a great shot of moral soul, too. And we got it with Kid. For all the making fun we did of how Opie, Mayberry RFD he was, our team needed him. We needed him on our team, and we needed him in our lives.”

Gary Carter helped make the Mets champions as much as Hernandez did. In a clubhouse full of bad boys and bad behavior and bad habits, he was such a good man. And as great as he was with the Montreal Expos, he will always be a Met out of October of 1986.

We have talked about this plenty in the last 25 years. But when there were two outs in the bottom of the 10th in Game 6 of the World Series, two outs and nobody on, when the team that had won 108 games in the regular season and then won that wonderful NLCS against the Astros was that close to going home, Kid was the first to absolutely refuse to make the last out of the World Series.

He singled, Kevin Mitchell and Ray Knight singled. Finally Mookie, with that slow roller down the first base line, like the whole season rolled right through Bill Buckner’s legs in that moment.

“I wasn’t going to make the last f------ out of the World Series,” is the way the late Bill Robinson, the first base coach that night, told it, and Darling has always wanted to believe that Kid said it exactly that way.

“Might have been the only time he didn’t use a euphemism,” Darling said.

In that moment, the nicest one of all of them was the toughest out in the world. Tough the way he was fighting cancer, even though you knew it was a death sentence from the start for Gary Carter, that heart and toughness weren’t going to be enough this time.

“I know that World Series, that Game 6, it was only sports,” Darling said. “But sometimes sports shows the greatness people have in them. Somebody had to stand up that night and say, ‘I’m not making the last out of the Series.’”

And maybe the lasting good of all this, out of the crazy and sometimes tragic brotherhood of those Mets, was that Carter’s brave fight against cancer, against his death sentence, let him know once and for all how much the men he played with loved him.

Darling, famously, was a part of that “Stand Up to Cancer” commercial during the last World Series, in that powerful and moving commercial with a lot of other people holding up signs saying they were standing up for mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and friends. Darling’s sign said, “My catcher.”

“I’m watching the game that night, and the commercial comes on,” Darling said Thursday. “And before it’s over, I hear my phone beeping. It was a number I didn’t recognize, because I guess Kid had changed his number. But the text just said I can’t believe you just did that, and how much it meant to him.”

There was a pause now at the other end of the phone Thursday, and then Darling, who understood the old Mets better than any of them, said, “I don’t know if Kid was crying when he sent that text. But I know I was when I finished reading it.”

Darling said: “What Kid fought through and went through, it makes you think about your own mortality. I was talking about this the other day with a friend of mine, about how when you’re young and dumb you make so many stupid decisions. Kid was never like that. He was always a good husband, a good father, a good humanitarian. It took me a while to learn how to do all that.”

Another pause and finally Ron Darling said, “All the endorsements and commercials you do in your life if you become a successful athlete. And the greatest I’ll ever do was that cancer commercial for my teammate. The one who wouldn’t make the last out one night in the World Series."